Carpignano's A Ciambra makes it to the Oscars

In keeping with neorealist traditions, Italo-American cineaste Jonas Carpignano’s second full-feature film (co-produced by Martin Scorsese) A Ciambra is shot on location in the Reggio Calabria seaside municipality of Gioia Tauro, on the Tyrrhenian coast.

This is home to one of Italy’s
largest container ports and is “one of the busiest maritime corridors in the
world”[1]
- a notorious cocaine smuggling route
and since long a stronghold for the Ndrangheta mafia.[2]
Carpignano’s film is defined by its authenticity and contains many realistic
elements, even if the director lets symbolic dream sequences break up the
narrative at regular intervals until these images form their own story that
runs parallel to the main narrative set in the present. Again in a neorealist
fashion, the actors are all generally non-professionals portraying characters
who have been dealt a hard card in life and who are of low social standing. The
majority of the characters in focus form a part of Calabria’s Roma community of
gypsy heritage and - as they are presumably members of the same extended family
on and off-screen - they all generally go by the surname Amato, with Pio Amato
being the name of both the lead actor and the young and expressive main
character. Equally poor as the members of their fellow African community (the two
groups share similar fates) Carpignano’s Romani characters, too, live on the
outskirts of society and they, too, engage in crime for a living. Their daily habitat
is an urban wasteland - barren and bleak, cold, full of rubbish and defined by
its general ugliness.

This is the unglamorous and harsh
setting for the film selected as Italy’s Oscar contender in the Best Foreign
Language Film category. Delivered partly in Italian, partly in the Romani
language, a number of dialogues in the film would have been nigh impossible for
Italian viewers themselves to comprehend unless the ethnic Romani utterances
had been subtitled into Italian. This preference for subtitles rather than
dubbing adds further authenticity to the film (and, one might argue, reflects
respect on the part of Carpignano towards the Roma community).

The
DVD version of the film, which has not yet reached Australian cinemas, is
divided into chapters entitled Pio, Autorubate,
Lacena, Il furto, L’arresto, Consegna dell’auto, Perquisizione,
Ilcampomigranti, Unabellaserata, Ilsognoconilnonno, LosbagliodiPio,
L’amicoafricano, Complice, and Giàuomo.
The
film becomes a timely contribution to the type of contemporary cinema that goes
against the mainstream and instead celebrates the anti-hero, the downtrodden
and the outcast - people who, in the case of A Ciambra, are of gypsy heritage and who lead a precarious existence
under the watchful eye of the Italian authorities, with the police constituting
a menacing presence in the Amato family’s life. Like Carpignano’s previous film
Mediterranea (2015) - which screened
at the Cannes Film Festival, could be considered a prequel to A Ciambra, and focuses on the risky and
dangerous trajectory of African refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea to
Italy only to face hardship and hostility also in what they initially
considered a safe haven - ACiambra,
too, confronts reality head-on. Both films also star Pio Amato and African Koudous Seihon in lead roles. From initially being presented a
mythical opening scene in which a nomadic gypsy traveller accompanied by a lone
horse is seen surrounded by a vast, open and desolate landscape, the viewer of A Ciambra is soon hurled into the all
the harsher everyday reality of what turns out to be the descendants of the
first character. Gone is the romantic setting and instead the story about to
unfold and which has a documentary feel to it (Carpignano says in an online
interview that he first met the then 11-year-old boy Pio Amato on the streets
of Gioia Tauro, and he explains that the screenplay of A Ciambra, years later, “began with a documentary approach. I
included scenes and experiences from their real life”[3])
is set in a cold and unaccommodating Italian South. We soon meet the mythical
gypsy from the opening scene in the guise of the nonno or grandfather – the family patriarch - in real time, surrounded
by members of the same Amato family who range from chain-smoking children
growing up fast as they imitate their older siblings and learn to follow in
their footsteps, to adolescents where 14-year-old Pio soon steps forth as a
main character, and a number of adults, some of them nameless. The more
experienced adults seem as adrift as the members of the younger generation and
Pio’s greying mother Iolanda - maternal head of the family in the unexplained
absence of a father figure, commanding in her presence and stern on the surface
- is, while financially dependent on the wads of notes that Pio brings home
after nights of dabbling in shady business, keeping up a façade of reprimanding
mother who scolds her teenage son and worries about him all at once. When her
eldest son Cosimo is arrested by the police Pio becomes the main breadwinner
and his money-making methods prove risky business as he desperately learns to
navigate the rough climate of Gioia Tauro, network with members of the African
community, and engages in stealing, wheeling and dealing all in order for him
and his family to survive.

These characters, played by
actors who “play themselves”, live under deplorable conditions and fluidly
inhabit homes identical to one another and all equally modest. True to their
nomadic nature they spend as much time, if not more, outside as inside, attempt
to stay warm next to makeshift fires, and line the streets standing or sitting,
all in a seemingly unoccupied state – schooling generally being rejected and
instead the preferred learning environment for the youngsters are the harsh
streets of Gioia Tauro. The children learn to copy the ways and adopt the
values of the adults and even if these members of the Roma community in many
ways share the same fate as their African counterparts, they openly despise
Africans and call some of them “marrocchini di merda”, and refer to them as
drunkards and low-lives (ironically, the Amato family members are they
themselves called “zingari di merda” by Italians in their local neighbourhood).
In one scene Pio and his family are pictured drinking in the family home when
they are told by a voice of reason: “Finirete come gli africani: ubriachi”.
While the Amato family members are generally left unimpressed by the Africans
in their midst - who are competitors in crime - they are at the same time obstructed
in their movements by the Italian authorities and receive regular visits from
the police, whether they are guilty of stealing or not. This reflects the
off-screen reality of the members of the Roma community, who tend to be
exploited and experience “difficult relations with local inhabitants.”[4]
Adrift and unwanted by the Italian community, no more nomadic but nor entirely
settled, the Romani Amato family members do share several commonalities with
the equally marginalised Africans who in the film are given considerable screen
presence. The two groups lead a precarious existence where every day becomes a
battle for survival. The only person who forms a real bond with the African
community is Pio who through his solid friendship with Ayiva from Burkina Faso
manages to bridge the two groups and whose narrated experiences become a quest
for maturity and lead to some kind of wisdom; a coming-of-age story where Pio
grows from boy to man and is finally accepted into the realm of adulthood. In
the final scene he is symbolically embraced by his brother and peers after
choosing to join them rather than the alternative group made up of younger
children. Pio is now officially considered “a man.”

Of even greater symbolical
importance is the scene foreboding of events to come, where the nonno, representative of the gypsy nomad
of the past, who was untrapped and unfettered, spends a moment alone with Pio, points
to the horse cart on which he was born and which is now stashed away in the
family shed, and declares:

“Io sono nato su quel
carro

Una volta eravamo
sempre per strada

Sempre per strada

Eravamo liberi

Sempre padroni

Eravamo liberi

Non dovevamo niente a
nessuno

Eravamo liberi e
andavamo sempre per strada

E adesso invece siamo
qua

Ricordati: Siamo noi
contro il mondo”

With those final words the man soon
thereafter abandons his earthly existence and with that the last link to what
was before is gone. Still, Pio is left with a larger message where freedom, independence,
and community spirit become keywords despite “the nomadic subject” having come
to symbolize “displacement and dispersion”[5].
Carpignano’s bold and moving film much worthy of an Oscar in its multilayered
representation of one type of contemporary reality leaves us wondering if,
after all, the once nomadic subject was not better off nomadic than trapped
under the precarious conditions of contemporary life in Gioia Tauro.

[2] It has been highlighted that the Ndrangheta … “in that region controls
not only agriculture but also drugs and arms trafficking”. E. Toscano, “The
Rise of Italian Populism and ‘Fascism of the Third Millennium’ in the Age of
Migration and Security”, in The Securitisation of Migration in the EU: Debates
Since 9/11, eds.
Gabriella Lazaridis and Khursheed Wadia (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 174.

[4] Filhol 2013, quoted by Emanuele Toscano in “The Rise of
Italian Populism and ‘Fascism of the Third Millennium’ in the Age of Migration
and Security”, The Securitisation of Migration in the EU: Debates
Since 9/11, eds. Gabriella
Lazaridis and Khursheed Wadia (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 174.

Jytte Holmqvist is a movie enthusiast with a doctorate in Screen and Media Culture from the University of Melbourne and a keen interest in contemporary Spanish and Italian culture. She has established a publishing record and presented at conferences nationally and abroad. Her interest in Italian film began in earnest at the University of Auckland when in the paper Italy on Screen she explored films by Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica, the Taviani brothers, and Pasolini - to mention but a few. With that grew a love for Italian cinema and the fascinating world that it opens up to the viewer.